Friday, September 16, 2016

In a (September 9th) New
York Times review of Kati Marton's new book, “True Believer - Stalin’s Last
American Spy” (Simon & Schuster, 2016), Timothy Naftali writes:

“In these troubling times, we are
more likely than our parents to accept on face value that John F. Kennedy’s
assassin Lee Harvey Oswald could have been a Lone Wolf, the archetype of the
self-radicalized individual - seduced by poisonous ideas into being a soldier
for a cause, acting on dark impulses without need of a supporting organization
and becoming a stranger to his family and community - now haunts the public
imagination.”

While Marton writes about Noel Field
as the True Believer in the Eric Hoffer mold, those interested in Noel Field
should read what David Talbot says about him in his book “The Devil’s
Chessboard," a book the New York Times refuses to review.

In Naftali'a review he makes a lot
of assumptions and tries to re-characterize Lee Harvey Oswald as JFK’s lone
killer, a lone nut case and a self-radicalized “Lone Wolf” terrorist acting as
a True Believer for a phantom cause.

Now in these troubling times, before
we or our parents accept on face value any these three presumptions -

1) The
case against Oswald has been shown over the years to have been weak,
specifically including the palm print on the barrel, the evidentiary value of
the paper bag, the hair & fiber evidence, the timing of the shots, the
condition of the rifle, Oswald's location at the time of the shooting, the
line-up identifications, the timing of the Tippit murder and the shell casings.

2) Investigation over the years has
shown that Oswald was not a "loner," and had a complex series of
associations with a variety of people, such as George de Mohrenschildt, Volkmar
Schmidt, Michael Paine, David Ferrie, Sergio Arcacha Smith, Guy Bannister, David
Atlee Phillips and others.

3) Far from an archetypal
self-radicalized militant, Oswald claimed to have been a Patsy and specifically denied shooting Kennedy and
Officer Tippit ("I didn't shoot anybody, no, sir."), an adamant
denial is the antithesis of a dedicated radical assassin.
Oswald also said during interrogation that JFK's death would probably not
greatly affect US policy toward Cuba, since LBJ would likely carry out the same
policy, and even the Warren Commission could not give Oswald a reasonable motive to kill the President.

In addition, Oswald's defection to
Russia may have been a fake defection, a dangle by a US intelligence
service as the unusually lenient treatment he received on
return to the States (e.g. – no known criminal investigation, no charges) is
not characteristic of treatment one might expect to be afforded to a true
defector during the height of the Cold War.

Now apart from Oswald, let's take a
moment to properly characterize Naftali, a former director of the Nixon Library
and one of those Miller Center scholars who transcribed the Presidential Tapes,
along with Philip Zelikow and Max Holland, whose blatant biases have already
been exposed.

When they got to transcribing the
Oval Office tapes JFK made in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis,
they claimed what the President said in response to Air Force Chief of Staff
Gen. Curtis LeMay’s statement that “You are in a pretty bad fix Mr. President,”
was “unintelligible,” when to others it was clear JFK said, “Your in it with
me.”

Philip Zelikow went on to be the
chief of staff of the 911 Commission and kept the pre-911 Able Danger reports
from reaching the commissioners and then kept the Saudi Arabian connections out
of their final report.

Max Holland wrote the “JFK
Assassination Tapes” book without mentioning the dozens of Air Force One
radio tape transmissions from the Collins Radio Liberty station or the many
other Collins Radio connections to the assassination that I have written
extensively about and made presentations on at the Wecht and Bethesda
conferences.

Zelikow, Holland and Naftali are in
the same boat here, so we know where Naftali is coming from and where he is going with this.

As for Naftali's attempted
re-characterization of Oswald as an archetypical Lone Wolf terrorist, the idea
that Oswald was JFK’s assassin must first be rejected, as the evidence that
implicates Oswald is questionable, and it is more likely he was framed as a
Patsy as he claimed to be.

So Oswald may have been alone but he
was not a wolf, he was a rabbit, Ozzie Rabbit - one set off for others to chase
while the real killers slipped quietly away.

It wasn't Oswald who was seduced by
poisonous ideas into being a soldier for a cause and a stranger to his family,
it is Naftali who is acting on dark impulses with a need for such supporting
organizations like the Miller Center and the New York Times.

Naftale says that Noel Field, as a
True Believing Soviet spy offers us a “window on the delusion and narcissism
that fuel the self-radicalized of any era,” it is Naftale and his Miller Center
minions who offer us a window of insight into the Dark Side of the Black Arts
and “Wilderness of Mirrors” who wants us to believe JFK was the victim of a
Lone Wolf, so let's look more closely at them as well as the organizations that
support them.

Let's see, the Miller Center in
Virginia is bankrolled in part by the Scripps Howard News Service (SHNS), one
of the chief assets of the CIA’s Mockingbird program and source of numerous
black propaganda disinformation stories on the assassination. These stories
include those furnished Seth Kantor in Dallas by Hal Hendrix in Miami within
hours of the assassination, and the bogus NSA report a few weeks before the
Hinckley attempt to kill Reagan that falsely tried to blame both presidential
attacks on Castro, a familiar CIA “active measure” that continues today.

Then there's Max Holland, Naftali’s
Miller Center cohort who unabashedly writes for the CIA’s in-house publication
and gets awarded grants from the Columbia-Lucas Foundation that was known as
the Columbia-Catherwood Award before the Catherwood Foundation was exposed as a
conduit for covert CIA action funds. And Holland lists among his benefactors a
German Venetian blind company - how shady is that?

We won't even bother going into the
New York Times, the paper of record that recently published an article calling
for the release of the secret NSA records on the suspicious death of UN
Secretary Dag Hammarskold, but doesn’t mention the still withheld NSA records
on the assassination of President Kennedy.

So when Naftali and Holland and
others try to describe the Patsy in the Dealey Plaza operation as an
“archetypical Lone Wolf seduced by poisonous ideas - a soldier for a cause
acting on dark impulses without a supporting organization,” you know they are
the ones acting on dark impulses and poisoning ideas as a mercenary soldiers
covertly working as a media assets for a nefarious secret organization.

William Kelly is a freelance
journalist and historian whose JFK assassination research is partially funded
by a grant from the Fund for Constitutional Justice Investigative Journalism
Project. He is Secretary of CAPA - Citizens Against Political Assassinations
(CAPA-HQ.com).

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Dear Max
Holland - this is in response to your series of articles on Soviet
Disinformation and the assassination of President Kennedy - and the recent
reference to it in The Daily Beast .

"An active measure is a time-honored KGB tactic
for waging informational and psychological warfare....The most common subcategory of active measures
is dezinformatsiya, or disinformation: feverish if believable lies
cooked up by Moscow Centre and planted in friendly media outlets to make
democratic nations look sinister....some of
the most famous conspiracy theories to bombinate in backrooms, basements,
street corners, college dorms were actually whole-cloth inventions of the
Cheka. For instance...Many in 1963 doubted that Lee Harvey
Oswald acted alone in murdering John F. Kennedy; but only a precious few ever
saw their paranoid Grassy Knoll explanation transformed into a Hollywood
blockbuster. American researcher Max Holland found that the KGB fabricated
letter that got planted in the Italian newspaper Paese Sera was the
first to allege that one of the suspects for the Kennedy assassination, Clay
Shaw, a New Orleans businessman, was actually an operative of Langley. The New
Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison, got hold of a copy of that letter and
while he never cited it in court, his film version Kevin Costner most certainly
did in the paranoid Oliver Stone movie JFK. Vasili Mitrokhin, a retired KGB
archivist who defected to the West and smuggled out six enormous cases of
Soviet foreign intelligence files, later recorded that the 'KGB could fairly
claim that far more Americans believed some version of its own conspiracy
theory of the Kennedy assassination, involving a right-wing plot and the U.S.
intelligence community, than still accept the main findings of the Warren
Commission.'" - Michael Weiss - The Daily Beast

As with
our mutual interest in the Air Force One radio communications, I share Max
Holland's interest in official government disinformation at Dealey Plaza though
I am not as fixated on the Soviet variety as Max Holland is.

First off
I accept the classic definition of disiformation as intentionally originating
from a state government Intelligence source, and not to be confused with
misinformation, that's just plain wrong and not originating from an intelligence
agency.

So far it
is alleged Soviet intelligence sources were responsible for the Dear Mr. Hunt
letter, the article on Permindex in Italian paper, and the support of
conspiracy theorists Mark Lane and Jochim Joesterin. Mitrokin is the acknoweded
primary source and it was Mitrokin who established his bonifides by
identifying (Robert Lipka), a Soviet mole in the National Security Agency.

When the
former code and cipher clerk was arrested by the FBI years after the damage was
done, he told the court at his arrangement that he saw official NSA documents
that identified the real assassin of President Kennedy. The judge then
adjourned the court but as the former NSA clerk was led away a reporter asked
him the name of the real assassin - to which he replied - Louis Angel Castillo.

You want
to follow Soviet disinformation then there's a deep political black hole where
im sure you won't venture.

First
off, why are the documents refered to by Lipka not among the NSA records
released under the JFK Act, as thev should be?

Former
FBI agent Bill Turner has disputed your contention that an Italian news article
sparked Jim Garrison to initiate the New Orleans investigation, though he later
became aware of it, so it's disconcerting for that to be quoted as fact.

The idea
the Russians would use psych war, black propaganda and disinformation to
influence American public opinion is disconcerting, but not so much as the
CiA's own disinformation campaign to blame what happened at Dealer Plaza on Lee
Harvey Oswald, Fidel Castro and Cuban Commies, a media campaign that continues
today - - what you call "active measures."

While you
come up with a half dozen attempts by the Ruskies to influence the public
perception on the assassination of JFK, there are dozens of examples -
case studies of this well orchestrafter operation to falsely blame the
assassination of JFK on Castro, most of them traced to CIA sources.

Someone
on Max Holland's team - I think his wife, suggested that you look for patterns
- and here the pattern is quite clear - and decipherable.

In order
to understand the very nature of disinformation and black propaganda you must
read the basic literature - John Barron on Soviet disinformation and Paul
Linebarger's standard text "Propaganda," that he wrote for the US
Army.

While
Barron focuses on the Soviets, as Max Holland does, Paul Linebarger pretty much
created the American variety of such esoteric black arts that he taught at the
John Hopkins Center for International Studies. Among his students were Joe
Smith, E. Howard Hunt, Edward Lansdale and David Atlee Phillips.
Linebarger was especially proud of Lansdale and Hunt, who he said had
"black minds," but he also cautioned his students - espionage agents
in the making, that they shouldnt use such secret covert ops and dirt tricks to
disrupt American democracy because it would ruin it.

When
General William Odom, former Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence
(ACSI) and a Director of NSA, was asked - what makes a good intelligence case
officer? Odom thought it over and said it was like the movie "The
Sting," - the con, a response that indicated he took Linebargber's class.

Paul
Linebargber's text book breaks propaganda into categories - white, grey and
black, and outlines the STASM formula for identifying and determining the real
source of black propaganda. But besides using his own book in his classes he
also assigned his pupils a linguistic text that was republished as "The
Big Con," by David Maurer. That book was the basis of the screenplay of
the movie "The Sting," in which sophisticated confidence men swindle
a mobster in a Big Con operation they called the Wire.

Maurer
was a Kentucky lingustics professor who studied the slang of street thieves,
pick pockets and gamblers who led him to the big time confidence men who
practicted the Big Con. Unlike theves and gamblers Big Con confidence men
designed to get the targeted victim - The Mark, to give up large amounts of
money in the belief he can get even more in a shady but believable deal in
which everyone except the Mark are actors in an elaborate play.

As the
former NSA general said, and as Linebarger taught, Maurer's book "The Big
Con," not only gives a good account of how to conduct a covert operation,
it also gives good tips and directions on how to recruit agents and dispense
with them after they are no longer needed - give them "the brush
off," as the Con Artists would put it.

The CIA
adopted the techniques, procedures and terminology of the Big Con in their
operations as their Cuba affairs in the 1960s indicate. JMWAVE for instance was
the largest CIA base ever, using the University of Miami south campus as the
bogus Zenith Technologies corporation - a fake front like the façade of a Western
town in old movies.

The
JMWAVE base was what the con artists called "The Big Store," and as
the NSA general said, the best intelligence agents and case officers were like
the actors in the movie The Sting. Just as Paul Newman played Henry Gondorf -
the smooth "Inside Man," others had different roles, including the
"Ropers" - who identify and recruit the Marks, and "Outside
Men," who run the play, whatever it is, just as David Morales and David
Atlee Phillips were the Outside Men to the Inside Men - Ted Shackley, William
Harvey and Des Fitzgerald at Mongoose, Task Force W and JMWAVE.

These
techniques, procedures and terminology were taught - not only to the agents and
case officers but to all the players, operators and assets "in the
field," as they say.

Antonio
Veciana was recruited by "Maurice Bishop," his case officer (aka
David Atlee Phillips), and before embarking on a twenty year career as a covert
CIA operative, he was given special training in psychological warefare that
included black propaganda techniques, terminology and covert operational
procedures that Linebarger outlined in his course.

Veciana's
lessons were given at a language school in Havana and in an office at the Pan
Am Bank building in Miami, that Mitch Werbel told HSCA investigator was
frequently used by the CIA.

Jack Ruby
deposited money in the Pan Am Bank for his Havana casino friends - the Fox
brothers and Castro gunrunner Robert McKeown said he was paid in cash wrapped
in Pan Am Bank wrappers, so there was some shenanigans going on there, and the
Pan Am bank was one of the lines of inquiry Gaeton Fonzi and Richard Sprague
were investigating when Sprague was sacked and Fonzi reigned in.

And just
as Maurer's The Big Con warns that blowing off the Mark is often hard to do, Phillips
had trouble getting rid of Veciana. Marks often want to come back and play some
more even though they lost tremendous amounts of money because playing the game
itself is addicting. As it was for Antonio Veciana, who was paid off in
six figures by "Maurice Bishop," but at first refused to positively
identify Philips as Bishop because he wanted to work for him again.

Now with
David Atlee Phillips dead and Veciana singing every song he knows that Bishop
taught him, perhaps it is time to review - not the Soviet disinformation, but
the all-American variety of black propaganda that purports to show that Fidel
Castro was behind the Dealey Plaza operation, an "active measure" as
they say at CIA, that continues today.